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Consumer Tech: Setting up an Echo Dot while staying at a hotel

Intro

I’m sure many people have faced this. You like to query your Echo Dot for basic information and you’d like to take it with you and work in your hotel room so you can get the local weather, etc. But then you are foiled by the setup process until you finally give up after trying to discover it as a new device numerous times.

I was in that exact situation last week. Finally I thought of something that broke me out of the discover device loop, so I wanted to share that.

The details

A hotel will typically offer Internet, but through a “captive portal.” This means, technically, the password they provide you at the front desk is not the SSID password, but a password to their portal’s web site. So it is technically not part of the WiFi information. That’s what makes it so hard for dumb devices like the Echo Dot to get past that page.

Normally you go to your room after checking in, and you perhaps set your phone to use their WiFi after dutifully logging in to the portal page. Then you get around to setting up your Echo device. I could not manage to finish the Echo Dot configuration under those conditions last week, though I tried many times over, including manual setup.

What I realized, though, is that it might help to start clean. So I “forgot” the hotel’s SSID (WiFi) on my phone. Then I was only using 4G communication. Then I went through the Device Setup in the Alexa App on my phone. At some point you get asked which WiFi to connect to, and you get redirected to the captive portal, where you put in the information. In other words I stumbled my way through it. But then it did work.

So I’d say the upshot is to configure the Echo Dot first before setting up your phone to use the hotel’s WiFi. I’m not sure it will always work, but at least it did work once! But if you did things in the wrong order go to your WiFi settings and “forget” the hotel’s WiFi – it may have the same effect.

2nd test – successful

Since I’m supposed to be the expert I had the opportunity to try my own technique at another hotel. It was about 10 minutes of stumbling, but then it did work in the end. Maybe my tip helped, maybe not.

As I do not have the straight recipe, you have to be willing to try different things. Pay special attention to whether or not your setup device is connected to the Dot’s WiFi (amazon-dkd or something like that) or not. That’s generally a good thing. Then you have it (the Dot) search for available WiFi networks. I guess. It’s confusing. You’ll probably need to put your Dot into setup mode mulitple times. Esimated time to stumble your way through it: 10 minutes. You can decide if it’s worth it or not.

Other ways

I’m thinking about mac address emulation, i.e., temporarily emulate the MAC address of the Echo device with a more amenable device, and do the poral login. But I haven’t had time to research it. I will post it here if I ever figure that out.

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